By Jordan Lofton - September 26th, 2011  Category: CCMBA 2012| Semester 1: Shanghai/Kunshan Repeat after me, “I am not a P. I am better than average. I will not accept the minimum. I am not a P.” As Type A’s I’m sure this is a morning mantra we all repeat to ourselves in front of the mirror before we start our days in residency and perhaps say to ourselves before we hit the submit button on the platform. For most of us however, at some point we will receive the dreaded “P” and for the real over achievers the dreaded “HP”.
I know for me I go through several stages when I don’t perform at the level I have set for myself. First is the feeling like I am going to puke because I am so disappointed in myself. Then there is the stage where I bang my forehead on the desk in cries of agony, “Why? Why Professor Anton? Why me? Why my paper? Whhhhyyyyyyyyyy?????” Okay, perhaps not that dramatic, but you get the point. Then I move on to the justification. “Well apparently he didn’t read my brilliant and excellent analysis of X. If he truly understood X he would have seen I am the best Y since the dawning of time. It’s not my fault my brilliance has eclipsed even the sun’s rays. I will wait for the day the reptilian aliens are defeated and the good aliens take over and show that I am an enlightened one.” Yes, for that brief egotistical moment I sore on my own flights of grandeur, until the reality that I just received the grade from one of Duke’s number one ranked faculty sets in. SPLAT! I am now back on solid ground, where I am left with my humility and a less than optimal grade. Okay, okay, I suck, I f*ed up, I earned a bad grade. Now how do I fix it?
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By Vince Cellini - September 23rd, 2011 Category: CCMBA 2012| Semester 1: Shanghai/Kunshan
I want to post today about a surprising gem I’ve found in this program: group work. I’ll come right out and admit that I don’t have the best history with groups in that I often feel like I can do a better job solo than when I’m working with a group. I don’t always have the best patience with the different personalities and compromises necessary when working in groups, so I’d say that in this specific area, I’m a tad weak. I realize this about myself, but at the same time I haven’t had experiences that would lead me to believe that group work inherently leads to better results…until now.
I feel like there are many concepts and topics that we have a chance to learn in this program, but I also believe that many can be learned from our own research or picking up a few good books. In the case of working with others, this program illustrates its strength. In my personal experience thus far, I can say that I’ve learned more about myself and how to work with others more effectively. I’ve learned other concepts as well in Microeconomics and Managerial Effectiveness, but it’s the “working with others” part as well as my own self-discovery that I think will be the most useful in my career.
Each person and group can only really speak to their own experiences, but I thought I’d take a little time and write about my time with my group to this point in the program. To begin with, the program asks that we take personality tests during the pre-work before Term 1. The admins use this to place us in our teams. Based on our group’s personality scores as a whole, I feel like we are purposely put with people that we may work well with but also people that we will struggle to work with. I suppose it’s the idea that through adversity we grow as professionals in experience and character…and I have to agree that there’s going to be experience AND adversity when you first start out with the group work!
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By Nick Sarraf - September 22nd, 2011 Category: CCMBA 2012| Semester 1: Shanghai/Kunshan Tom Purcell joined Peace Corps at age 23. It was the summer of 1965 and his first assignment was to go work in Bassi, a small village in North India, about 20 miles east of Jaipur. The villagers, none of whom spoke English, took him for a British when they saw him the first time. Sensing a faint resentment that had built for him, the headmaster of the local school explained it to people that he was from “umreeka”, a different country that was also a British colony once. A lot of people then didn’t know about the US and then he would make a reference to Hiroshima. I personally find it amusing how those people knew about Japan when they didn’t know the US but that’s a separate discussion altogether.
Many years later, in the 1990s, I spent my early teenage years in Bassi. It was then I came to know about Tom Purcell. I also came to know that my father who was a college student back then often played the role of his translator. He was in fact 1 of the 2 college students in the whole village who spoke some English and thus being given the responsibility was inevitable. Tom lived in the village for about 2 years and worked tirelessly during his stint. People, who knew him, remembered him fondly – he’d helped start scholarship program at the local school, helped set up first public lavatories in the village, and most importantly, he was master at consensus building for solving problems compared to the other “foreigners” before him who came to rule, always used force and often guns.
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